Principle 1: Students should receive explicit and systematic instruction ...
...in decoding, vocabulary, fluency, concept knowledge, and comprehension strategy use.
Explicit instruction involves clear explanations and step-by-step teaching that gradually leads students from introduction and modeling of material, through practice, to independence.
Systematic instruction is carefully sequenced, with new concepts and skills building on each other over time.
"One of the greatest tools available to us in this pursuit [teaching] is explicit instruction—instruction that is systematic, direct, engaging, and success oriented. The effectiveness of explicit instruction has been validated again and again in research involving both general education and special education." (Archer & Hughes, 2011)
This may seem obvious to the casual observer of literacy instruction. Teachers should teach, right? Unfortunately, many well-regarded reading programs and experts exhort teachers to shy away from teacher-directed instruction. They say that reading and writing should be "caught, not taught." What happens, then, for those students who don't catch on to the basics of literacy?
Dig Deeper into Principle 1: Click to read "Putting Students on the Path to Learning: The Case for Fully Guided Instruction" by Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller.
Principle 2: Background knowledge is a key element of reading comprehension, and therefore, should be built with intention.
"In the mathematically rigorous formulation of quantum mechanics, the state of a quantum mechanical system is a vector belonging to a (separable) complex Hilbert space . This vector is postulated to be normalized under the Hilbert space inner product." (From "Quantum Mechanics" on Wikipedia).
If you're like me, you can read all of the words in those two sentences. If you're also like me, and lack a lot of knowledge of quantum mechanics, it's likely you didn't comprehend beyond the most basic meaning of the sentences. (It's about formulas? And maybe there was someone named Hilbert? Who had a space named after him?). If you are an ace at quantum mechanics, you probably understood it all.
That's because background knowledge has repeatedly shown to have a big impact on comprehension. In a now famous 1988 study, Recht and Leslie found that kids with knowledge of the topic of a text can comprehend the text regardless of their status as a "struggling" reader. Kids who were considered good readers, but didn't have knowledge of the topic -- baseball, in the study -- found comprehension challenging.
Findings such as these are both hopeful and daunting. Hopeful, because students with academic background knowledge can tackle more challenging texts than we previously thought. Daunting, because we spend a huge amount of our school day teaching "comprehension skills," while science and social studies are often neglected. In order to help all kids comprehend, we must intentionally build knowledge of the world around them, while also accessing students' own cultural literacies.
Dig Deeper into Principle 2: Click to read "How Knowledge Helps: It Speeds and Strengthens Reading Comprehension, Learning--And Thinking" by Daniel Willingham..
4. All students, regardless of reading ability, deserve teacher-supported access to on-grade-level texts.
If you are a parent, you've likely boasted about your child's reading level, or been concerned that your child hasn't reached the level someone told you they should. To assess growth, such levels can be helpful. For a long while, however, such levels have been used in a more insidious way: to determine which books students should be reading.
The Common Core State Standards, educational justice, and research all demand that we not limit students to texts they can already read. Wilcox & Eldredge (2000) found that students learned more when they read above their reading levels, but in a scaffolded manner. If we want our students to grow, we have to set worthy challenges before them.
5. Culturally-responsive teachers center their students while also promoting academic success.
I am a big believer in culturally-responsive pedagogy. However some teachers use the idea as an excuse for why their students can't achieve at high levels. I will never be one of those teachers. In her seminal paper on culturally-responsive teaching, Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) identified academic success as a key component of cultural relevance. Yes, I believe that our capitalist system props up a White, cishet patriarchy at the expense of those who don't fit into that world. However, we can't wait for white supremacy to end to teach kids to read.
Principle 3: All students, regardless of reading ability, deserve and benefit from teacher-supported access to on-grade-level texts. Principle 4: Effective teachers are responsive to students’ needs, strengths, interests, and cultures. Principle 5: Research-informed practice changes as new research contributes to the field of teaching.